China Mobile and Baidu plan mobile cloud center in China

Chinese telecoms player China Mobile is working with the leading Chinese language search engine Baidu, to build a data center in Beijing for mobile Internet users.

The Baidu Yizhuang New Generation Search Data Center (phase 1) will be jointly funded and constructed by the telecoms operator and the search engine giant. The project is claimed as the first large cloud data center rolled out for mobile internet business in China.

The new facility will have a floor space of about 38,000 sq m (roughly 400,000 sq feet), and is expected to host more than 40,000 servers once fully completed, according to Tencent Tech News. China Mobile will provide 1,388 high-density racks to Baidu when Phase 1 is completed at the beginning of 2016.

Two big innovators
The center will use an energy-saving design, combine grid and high voltage direct current (HVDC) for power supply, and deploy other technologies developed by Baidu itself for achieving high density, lower energy consumption and automatic operation and maintenance.

The two players behind this new project are investing heavily in building data centers and developing new technologies.

As the largest search engine in China, Baidu operates data centers across the country. Among them, its 4.7bn CNY Yangquan data center in Shanxi Province in North China has a total floor space of 120,000sqm, which can host 120,000 servers and stores 4,000PB data.

Baidu has been at the forefront of technological innovation. Its data centers have deployed ARM-based servers, custom-designed all-in-one racks, 10Gb top-of-rack (TOR) switches and self-designed Solid State Disks (SSD). In this era of cloud and big data, the internet giant has become one of the pioneers in constructing and promoting prefabricated modular data centers.

The other player behind the Baidu new generation search data center—China Mobile owns the largest TD-LTE 4G network in the world and has 90m 4G users now. The telecommunication player is also expanding its data center infrastructures.

Last November, its international subsidiary—China Mobile International Limited brought online a 24,000 sqm global network center in Hong Kong. In the same month, the company broke ground a data center of 3,200 racks in Qinghai province in West China. At the beginning of this year, it announced a 3 bn CNY project for building a 180,000sqm data center in Zhuzhou, Hunan Province in South Central China.

Apart from developing data center business, China Mobile is working to transform itself from a traditional mobile telecommunication company to a provider of mobile internet and information consumption services. For instance, at the end of last year, the operator invested 3.172bn CNY to build a research and development center focusing on cloud, big data and IT supporting systems in Suzhou in East China.

Currently, China Mobile’s cloud bases in Beijing and Guangzhou have been put into use. Similar projects in Harbin in North China, Guizhou in Southwest China, and Suzhou are being planned or constructed.